SEP public meetings in Sydney and Melbourne

Seventy years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky: The Fourth International and the Perspective of the Socialist Equality Party

11 August 2010

These public meetings in Sydney and Melbourne will set out the socialist program being advanced by the Socialist Equality Party in the August 21 federal election campaign, and outline the principles and historical perspective on which it is based.

The assassination of Leon Trotsky, who died of wounds inflicted by a Stalinist assailant on August 21, 1940, was the climax of a campaign of political genocide directed by Josef Stalin and his henchmen against an entire generation of workers, intellectuals and revolutionists that had prepared and led the October 1917 Russian Revolution, and established the first workers’ state in history.

Trotsky was not only the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution, he was also the supreme strategist of the perspective of world socialist revolution on which it was based. In 1938, he founded the Fourth International to carry forward the struggle for this perspective.

The life and legacy of Leon Trotsky has the most profound contemporary significance. The entire course of historical development since his assassination 70 years ago has vindicated the ideas, principles and program for which he fought and died.

Today, all the old nationalist and bureaucratic organisations that dominated the workers’ movement for decades have either collapsed or function as open agents of the capitalist ruling elites. At the same time, the breakdown of the international capitalist system signifies that the working class in every country stands on the brink of revolutionary struggles. Never before have the ideas, program and perspective of Leon Trotsky, embodied today in the International Committee of the Fourth International and its Australian section, the SEP, had greater significance. They will be the subject of the report and discussion at these meetings.

The SEP urges all those interested in the socialist alternative to militarism and war, austerity and social inequality, and the ever-deepening assault on democratic rights to attend.